Can Big Data And Mobile Make Health Care More Effective?

Mobile and big data are good medicine for health care. Providers are leveraging big data to more effectively inform decisions while taking advantage of the immediacy and convenience that mobile device technology has to offer.

For example, athenahealth'sEpocrates Bugs + Drugs, which was downloaded 100,000 times in its first month of release, puts critical information about bacteria types and resistance patterns in communities throughout the United States into clinicians’ hands. And Next IT’s Alme for Healthcare is a virtual assistant platform that enables healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies to more effectively interact with patients, and vice versa.

Presenting this kind of data in a mobile format enables earlier and more strategic intervention.

Take Benovate’s Your Data program, for instance. Focused on preventative care, Benovate uses big data to anticipate a person's health status. "By making this prediction, Benovate’s health coaches will be able to intervene earlier in the healthcare continuum to keep people on their personal healthcare path and start to complete the data set," said Reier.

Pieter Schouten, general manager of healthcare for big data solutions provider Opera Solutions, said that value from the combination of big data and mobile technology comes from the day-to-day decisions made by front-line healthcare employees. "These employees are monitoring patients, reviewing invoices, scheduling staff and making purchasing decisions," he said. "By feeding relevant information and insights to tablets, phones and laptops, administrators are empowering these front-line employees with the right information at the right time, allowing them to make better, more data-focused decisions.”

However, healthcare and technology experts agree that balance is key when it comes to care-related decisions using big data.

The biggest issue is privacy, said Dr. John Haughton, chief medical information officer with cloud engagement platform provider Covisint. The more patient information becomes available, the bigger the risk that the information will get into the wrong hands.

Healthcare providers must also balance the benefits of big data with the invaluable insight that experience and context provide.

"Big data-generated insights should be used to inform and help guide decisions, but becoming too dependent on these insights or ignoring human expertise is problematic,” said Opera Solutions' Schouten. “Trained physicians, specialists, surgeons, nurses and techs still need to rely on their training and experience to make final judgments.”